Don’t Call Them Booster Shots

The Covid-19 vaccines work. So why are we planning to give fully vaccinated people a third dose?

Third doses of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are on their way.

Israel has already been vaccinating people with third doses for almost a month, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a third dose for immunocompromised people a couple of weeks ago. U.S. health officials said last week that they wanted third doses to be available to all Americans age 16 and older eight months after they became fully vaccinated (which would be sometime in September for people who got vaccinated first). And on Wednesday, Pfizer started the application process to get FDA authorization for that third dose.

Of course, the fact that we’re now being told we should get a third shot not long after public health officials were suggesting (foolishly) that vaccination would offer people perfect protection against Covid has been seized on by vaccine skeptics as evidence of the vaccines’ ineffectiveness. The vaccines can hardly be offering meaningful protection against Covid, they argue, if we need to get another one just months later.

This criticism has been helped along by the way public health officials and the press have explained the decision to support a third dose. They’ve talked about the evidence that the immunity afforded by the vaccines may wane over time. But in doing so, they haven’t always been clear that that’s mainly true of immunity to infection and that myriad studies suggest the protection the vaccines offer against hospitalization, serious illness, and death has waned only slightly, if at all. Unvaccinated people are still far more likely — as in 10–15 times more likely (and sometimes more) — to be hospitalized with Covid, get a severe case of it, or die.

Now, it’s not totally obvious that we need to hand out third doses if protection against hospitalization and serious illness is still intact, particularly given that this means we’re going to be giving third shots to fully vaccinated Americans at a time when most of the world’s population hasn’t gotten one shot.

But American public health officials are, inevitably, going to worry first about the course of the pandemic in the U.S. Reducing…